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Amazon's drone delivery program is the joke it always sounded like. (news.yahoo.com)

submitted 9 months ago by FlyingSquid@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Only one item can be delivered at a time. It can’t weigh more than 5 pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something breakable, since the drone drops it from 12 feet. The drones can’t fly when it is too hot or too windy or too rainy.

You need to be home to put out the landing target and to make sure that a porch pirate doesn’t make off with your item or that it doesn’t roll into the street (which happened once to Lord and Silverman). But your car can’t be in the driveway. Letting the drone land in the backyard would avoid some of these problems, but not if there are trees.

Amazon has also warned customers that drone delivery is unavailable during periods of high demand for drone delivery.

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[-] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 82 points 9 months ago

Reminds me of an insurance company that wanted to use drones to survey roof damage and in the long run they decided it was overall better to just use a camera on a long ass stick.

[-] snowe@programming.dev 77 points 9 months ago

Just so you know, companies already use drones for roof surveys. I work for sunrun and we use them to analyze roofs for solar installations and whether roofs need to be fixed before hand.

[-] ramblinguy@sh.itjust.works 7 points 9 months ago

Yeah this sounds like a great use for drones- take photos of high up places that is dangerous to climb to

[-] Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 5 points 9 months ago

Aerial drones are a particularly stupid method of delivery. Delivery trucks, combined with terrestrial delivery robots are a much more versatile approach.

[-] helenslunch@feddit.nl 7 points 9 months ago

Delivery trucks require a human to drive. And despite the insistence otherwise, we are a long long way from any sort of automated driving system. They also operate on a 2-dimensional plane and have to navigate around a variety of structures.

Conversely, aerial automation is significantly easier since it is 3-dimensional and there are not obstacles to navigate. This also means it's much easier to automate.

Companies like Zipline have been operating these services for many years now with great success.

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this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023

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